Gamers aren’t turning to magazines — or even websites — as much as they used to. These days, you’re more likely to find them on YouTube or Twitch to watch Let’s Play videos, Minecraft machinima, or streaming League of Legends matches. It’s a bold new world, and YouTube wants to capture a little more of the video gaming market with its new YouTube Gaming site, which will also have its very own app for mobile devices and gamers on the go.
Everything YouTube gaming related will show up in this new space; now when you search for “Call” on YouTube Gaming, you can be sure that you’ll get Call of Duty videos only, and not “Call Me Maybe” music videos (as if that’s a bad thing).
YouTube is promising that more than 25,000 games will have their own page on the site and app, giving you a single place to grab all the best videos and live streams about each title. There will be game-centric channels, as well, from a ton of YouTube partners and game publishers.
All you need to do to keep up with your favorite games is to add it to your collection or subscribe to a channel to get notifications about new live streams or gaming episodes.
Twitch has been storming the live streaming market, bringing the community of gamers closer together; it’s hard to go five feet at any gaming conference these days without seeing a panel of twenty-somethings holding pro-level microphones and expounding upon the latest eSports matchup, a scene that would be familiar to any regular ESPN junkie out there.
YouTube has pushed the live-streaming front-and-center on the YouTube Gaming homepage, and will be revamping things even further in the next few weeks to make it super easy for any gamer with a need to broadcast to get their show out to the masses. There’ll be even easier ways to get high-frame-rate video streaming at 60 frames per second up on YouTube Gaming without even having to schedule it, and you’ll get one single link to create a presence on the new site and app.
YouTube Gaming is coming this summer, with initial launch in the U.S. and U.K. You can tune in from home and hear more details on what the YouTube Gaming team is up to either on the main YouTube Gaming page or at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) next week on the regular YouTube site, too.
